Keep track of Installed Packages in Debian

Since I usually do a 'aptitude update' followed by an 'aptitude safe-upgrade' and an 'aptitude full-upgrade' almost on a daily basis, I sometimes need to keep track of what was upgrade, installed or removed, because eventually those upgrades generate some problems or unexpected issues.


To keep track of it I generate a list of packages installed and orphans packages every day.

# m h  dom mon dow   command
00 02 * * * /usr/bin/updatedb
00 11 * * * /usr/bin/dpkg --get-selections > /root/debian-packages/`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`-packages.list; SUFFIX=packages.list /root/debian-packages/deleteEquals.sh
01 11 * * * /usr/bin/deborphan > /root/debian-packages/`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`-deborphan; SUFFIX=deborphan /root/debian-packages/deleteEquals.sh

Also, to don't waste space, I created a small script to remove the lists in case they don't have any changes, which is the "deleteEquals.sh" script.


The script just need the variable SUFFIX set so it knows which files should be checked, the whole script is below:

#!/bin/bash
SUFFIX=${SUFFIX:="packages.list"}
cd /root/debian-packages
for i in $(ls -1rt /root/debian-packages/*${SUFFIX}); do 
if [ -z $PREVIOUS ]; then 
PREVIOUS="$i";  
else 
diff -q $PREVIOUS $i > /dev/null 2>/dev/null; 
RESULT="$?"; 
if [ $RESULT -eq 0 ]; then
rm $PREVIOUS;
fi
PREVIOUS="$i"; 
fi;
 done